Michael Hiltzik: Perils of online college learning

Monday

Aug 5, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Los AngelesLet it not be said that San Jose State University hasn’t taught the world a valuable lesson in the promises and pitfalls of the fancy new craze for online university learning.The Cal State University...

By Michael Hiltzik

Los Angeles

Let it not be said that San Jose State University hasn’t taught the world a valuable lesson in the promises and pitfalls of the fancy new craze for online university learning.

The Cal State University campus set itself up as a pioneer in the field in January, when it announced plans to enroll up to 300 students in three introductory online courses; the fee would be $150, a deep discount from the usual cost of more than $2,000.

A few weeks ago the results of the experiment came in. More than half the students flunked. San Jose’s work with Udacity, the well-funded Silicon Valley start-up that set up the online program, will be suspended for the fall semester — put on “pause,” as the partners say — so the courses can be retooled.

“We want to reduce the hype and take a scientific look at the results,” San Jose State’s provost, Ellen Junn, told me.

That’s very wise, but the chances that careful evaluation of the San Jose experiment will reduce the hype surrounding online learning are slim. Online learning is seen today as the answer to virtually every problem facing higher education, especially public higher ed.

Strapped for cash? You can vastly expand your program without hiring lots of crabby, expensive professors. For example, Georgia Tech is proposing to expand its computer science master’s program from 300 students to 10,000 by offering its courses online around the world. The school figures it can do this without expanding its 80-member faculty by more than eight teachers. This looks like a “significant revenue generator for the college,” according to the original proposal.

Too few classroom seats for the thousands of students hungering for your professors’ lectures and your institution’s degrees? Put the lectures online and reach a worldwide student body! Tired of paying to sweep your buildings’ corridors and scrape ivy off the exterior walls? Online platforms require no such upkeep. Students will learn better, and at less expense, through the miracle of technology.

The hype originates mostly from educational start-ups backed by millions of dollars in venture capital. Udacity, which was founded by Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor and Google fellow who says his goal is to bring “the very best of higher education to everyone worldwide,” launched last year with $20 million in venture funds. Its closest rival, Coursera, also founded by Stanford faculty members, has collected $65 million in backing so far, including a chunk from the World Bank.

So it’s not surprising that the services these firms offer resemble the product of a business model more than an educational model. More to the point, critics say, it’s a Silicon Valley business model.

“They think the distribution of information that they’re part of is the same as education, and that’s just not true,” says Christopher Newfield, an English professor at UC Santa Barbara who has been tracking the spread of the online learning mania. “Learning is not the same as watching TV or playing video games.”

As it happens, San Jose State is ground zero not only for the rollout of online college classes but for the pushback too.

In an open letter in April, the school’s philosophy department rejected an administration directive to use an online video of Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel lecturing to his own students in a class on social justice. The material was provided to San Jose State by edX, a partnership that Harvard and MIT created to market online lectures by their faculty and others’ (including UC Berkeley’s).

“Having a scholar teach and engage his or her own students in person is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her own students,” the professors wrote. They pointed to the risk that the edX model would lead to two classes of universities: a top tier “in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of video-taped lectures and interact with a glorified teaching assistant.”

That distinction is what defines “education.” Anyone who has come into personal contact with an inspiring professor at the top of his or her field knows that the experience can’t be reproduced by remote control; my own entire graduate school experience was made worthwhile by a single extraordinary teacher, without whom it might have been an utter waste of time. (Mel Mencher, step forward.)

The underlying problem with the online learning craze is that its proponents vastly overvalue the tools provided by the online platform and treat the content — that is, the material being learned — as a commodity.

It’s undoubtedly true that many aspects of online learning will prove valuable, in time.

But if university administrators think the online model will allow them to save money, say, by employing fewer or less-qualified teachers, without sacrificing the quality of the education they provide, they’ve been hoodwinked.

Michael Hiltzik (mhiltzik@latimes.com) is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

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